I’ve been thinking a lot about the past lately, one reason being that I had to try to re-create it so that Sean Howe’s book, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, would be as accurate as memory would allow, the other being I’m trying to lead as uncluttered a life as I can, so whatever doesn’t seem absolutely necessary to own … goes.

Which means that not only did I have to recently explain when I was hired by Marvel Comics to be Editor of the British reprint books, how long I worked in that position, and when I moved over to work in the U.S. Bullpen, but I then ran across a document which proved that what I had told Sean … was wrong! Well, not 100% wrong … just wrong enough.

What I’d thought, from this vantage point of three decades after the fact, was that I’d worked on the British books for six months or so, yet a couple of pages I just ran across shows …

… I was only there for three!

At least that’s what I have to believe if I can trust the survey I completed in the mid-’70s for Who’s Who of American Comic Books, when I presumably had a better handle on what had only recently occurred.

The spread between three and six months might not seem like much, but it is a 50% difference, and for someone like Howe, who’s trying to make sense of Marvel’s mid-’70s chaos, when Roy stepped down as Editor-in Chief, Len took over, and a bunch of new kids came on board, that kind of memory lapse only makes putting together the puzzle more difficult.

Which signals to me that when it comes time for me to fill you or some future researcher in on what happened during any period of time from my past that might be historically significant, whether it be Marvel or Clarion or Science Fiction Age or even my current Syfy time, in the absence of contemporaneous documentation, whether it be letters, diaries, or other evidence, you’ll probably end up with some unintentional errors.

It’s not that I’m deliberately trying to behave like James Frey—because I believe we should be as truthful in our memoirs as possible, whether they make us look bad or (even worse) result in boring anecdotes, but as I’m learning more and more as time passes, memory is malleable.

You’ve been warned.